R.I.P Mike Starr

The original bassist of Alice In Chains was found dead on March 8. He was 44. I'm guessing people who aren't fans of the band don't know who he was. Starr played bass on AIC's first two studio records. He contributed to the most "well known" Alice In Chains songs. His work can be heard on the song "Would?", "Man In The Box" and all the other songs from Facelift and Dirt. It's a shame that he could not overcome his addictions.

TIL: I am allergic to alder, birch and oak

Today I had an allergy test done. As I suspected, I am allergic to grass. I guess I'm just the typical hay fever sufferer, and that's fine by me, but it turn out I am also allergic to alder, birch and oak. That was totally new to me. There goes a career in trail building and forestry...

Canucks win two in a row!

For the first time in about a month, the Vancouver Canucks managed to win two games in a row. For the last month, they have been a .500 team. Imagine that, a .500 team was #1 in the NHL for the previous month! Of course, this was seen as a problem by the sports writers in Vancouver, but consider how many teams in the NHL would love for their .500 play to be a serious problem. Think of Edmonton, Columbus, NYI and Ottawa. Maybe the Canucks have had problems with consistency, but they are still the best team right now.

Also, Cory Schneider got his first career shut out tonight.

Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3

I just watched a couple of video reviews for Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3, and I am impressed! When Alpha 2 was released, it was very unstable and of low quality in general. I thought for sure Canonical would ship a buggy OS in April, but wow, it turned out better than expected. I am still not a fan of Unity (Gnome Panel guy here), but it looks better than before. I also like how Firefox 4 looks. I have said that I would wait until 12.04, but I am beginning to change my mind. I think I will update to 11.04, but I will wait until the 11.04 Macbuntu theme gets released.

If you have the time and hard drive space, check out Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 for yourself.

Canucks after the trade deadline

I am impressed by what mike Gillis managed to do this year at the trade deadline. He made the #1 team even more complete. for many years now, Canucks GMs past and present have been criticised for doing nothing (or not doing enough) at the trade deadline. Most years this was a fair criticism, as Canucks teams of seasons past have needed a lot of improvement at the deadline.

This year was different. The Canucks are currently #1 in the NHL, so if ever there was a year when doing nothing was a good thing, this was it. Instead, Mike Gillis acquired Chris Higgins and Maxim Lapierre without giving up much all around. Now the team is even deeper and tougher to play against than before. Congratulations Mr. Gillis, you have built a true Stanley Cup contender.

44 days left

Just posting to point out that there are 44 days left in the semester. personally, I still feel like the semester just started. I've been slacking off way too much. I probably should get back on the horse, but I do feel good just slacking off. I have two more midterms coming up, so I should start studying. Judging by the course content, the algorithms midterm will be quite hard.


This blog post counts as school work, right?

Every programmer should know at least one scripting language

I came to this realisation after a recent interview I had. The interview involved some programming questions in the language of my choice. Now, this job would involve Objective-C and Java, so clearly they didn't care how well I knew the syntax of those languages. They wanted to test my knowledge of core CS principles as well as my problem solving skills. I didn't get the job, by the way.

What I realised afterwards was that doing the test in PHP made it somewhat easier to focus on the logic of the problem at hand. So even you hardcore C/C++/Java/C# types need to learn a weak typed scripting language because even if you're a hardcore C guy, you might not get the hardcore C job because you failed to answer a programming question in C.

My suggestions would be Perl, PHP and/or Python.